Africans’ Protests Highlight Tensions in Guangzhou

Protests by Africans in Guangzhou this week over the death of a Nigerian man in police custody prompted wide reactions online and served to draw attention to tensions between locals and the southern city’s large population of African immigrants.

State-run Xinhua news agency said “more than 100” Africans protested and disrupted traffic on Tuesday in the capital of China’s Guangdong province after the Nigerian’s death.

Sina Weibo

A screenshot shows a photo of protests by African residents in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou published Tuesday on the official feed of the Guangzhou Journal on Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo

Guangzhou police said the protest started outside the Kuangquan Police Station after the Nigerian man got into an argument with the owner of a motorcycle taxi over a fare on Monday afternoon, and both people were taken to the station. About four hours later, according to the police statement, the man “lost consciousness suddenly” and died after efforts to revive him failed.

About 300 policemen gathered along the road to confront the protesting Africans. Many African men held banners saying “Give us the dead body” in front of the police station. Online photos show an angry crowd attacking the police car with bricks and police using shields to disperse protesters. The police statement released Tuesday, said police had acted “properly and legally.”

Efforts to contact Guangzhou Public Security Bureau officials on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

The incident was widely discussed on China’ Twitter-like microblogs. Many comments were harshly critical of Africans in Guangzhou, especially those residing there illegally, accusing them of committing crimes and calling on authorities to take measures against them.

“This protest shows how hard it will be for local police to manage Africans in Guangzhou. They protest! We local people seldom do anything like this ourselves,” said one user.

A debate on the Baidu Tieba online discussion forum has centered on Africans in Guangzhou long before this protest. Racist comments abound on the forum, with many users complaining about African men “bullying” local Chinese women, saying “China may have its 57th and 58th minority group: African immigrants and their mixed-blood kids with Chinese women.” Others call for tolerance and fair treatment of Africans, saying Guangzhou should behave like an international metropolis.

This is not the first time that local African groups have clashed with Guangzhou police. Hundreds of Africans attacked Kuangquan Police Station in July 2009, apparently after an African jumped to his death as he tried to escape a passport check.

Decades earlier, in December 1988, large-scale anti-African protests by Chinese students erupted in Nanjing after a security guard stopped an African student from bringing two Chinese women, who were suspected of being prostitutes, into his dorm at Nanjing Hehai University. The incident fueled negative sentiment among Chinese students toward African men dating Chinese women; 13 students were injured in the resulting campus protests.

Africans started moving to Guangzhou in earnest in the late 1990s, drawn by opportunities in the province’s manufacturing industries. Xiaobei Road, where Tuesday’s protest occurred, is said to be the largest “African town” in China.

According to reports in Chinese media, the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, a local-governmental think tank, about 20,000 registered Africans lived in Guangzhou in 2008, but the actual number, including short-term residents and illegal immigrants, was estimated at as much as 200,000, which roughly equaled 2% of Guangzhou’s population and compared with about 5,700 Japanese working for Japanese companies in Guangzhou.

A local survey conducted in 2011 showed that Guangdong residents are becoming less tolerant of Africans, and according to a report by the Singapore-based news website Zaobao.com in 2009, many Africans in Guangzhou claim they have suffered from racial discrimination.